Here the objection might be that there is no separating sound from sense when it comes to the operations of language, as is suggested by Frost's coining of the phrase "the sound of sense" to refer, for example, to the speech contour of rising inflection that ends a question, or as in the case of the dactylic sloping of the Latinate word "copulate," as opposed to the monosyllabic slap of any of its Germanic synonyms.

This passage--its appeal to sound (luminous plume) and rhythm (not just dactylic but also trochaic and iambic), as well as its (almost) violation of the rules of syntax in the repetition of "up up up, on and on, down down and across" and "sky made vaster" marks this passage with the ludic play described by Barthes.

Likewise, dactylic rhymes in Russian verse that have been very common since the mid-nineteenth century (Nekrasov, Fet, Bal'mont and others) find no correspondence in French, and to an even lesser degree do compound or polysyllabic rhymes, like those of Mayakovslcy.

One must question therefore whether a Roman critic of the late Republic, or even a lay reader, would have been willing to list poems written in dactylic hexameter and elegiac couplets under the same generic class.

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